Racial Profiling
Friday, August 7th, 2009A little while ago I was talking to my brother on the phone while shopping for groceries and expressed my distaste for racial profiling and some, obviously reasonable, person decided that he would drop in on my conversation and tell me how liberal I am if I think that “those people” are not more prone to crime than the rest of us.
So I asked him if he were to only look for bad strawberries and just assume that all other fruit were free of or had a smaller amount of defects, how would he find the results?
After his brain gears slowly screeched to a stop, I answered for him: if you are only looking at strawberries as being bad, then you would find more bad strawberries than in any other fruit. It doesn’t mean that other fruit has a smaller rate of being bad, just that you are only looking at strawberries.
I am not racist, I believe we are all humans. I could be no more racist than I could hate people with blond hair. So what is my problem with racial profiling? It has less to do with it being racist than it does to it letting people off the hook by ignoring them.
I know that not every crime is going to be caught by the police. I know that crime is not limited to a race or even class of people. So what happens if the police are only actively watching black people while I am getting robbed at gun point by two lazy white assholes? Yes, that is a very emotional statement. My point is that if the police are watching only a certain race, class or appearance of people, then the people they are not watching get to do the same or worse crimes right behind them.
Davin Creed
